Most modern devices, and particularly including transportation vehicles like automobiles as a prime example, have become both much more powerful, efficient, and safe, but at a cost of also being much more complex and correspondingly much less reliable. Indeed, modern devices have become inherently fragile. The most common element in this substantial dual increase of advantages and disadvantages of modern devices such as cars is the ever increasing use of digital computers and microprocessors to control essential functions that were originally mechanical systems integrated with electrical, hydraulic, and chemical systems. More specifically, these digital microprocessors have been integrated into a central computer control system for the entire car that controls most or all of the essential functions of the car. Therefore, the entire modern device has become only as reliable and safe as the extraordinarily complex hardware and software computer system that controls it. Furthermore, and critically, mechanical systems tend generally to degrade in a localized manner and slowly over time in a gradual progression which often becomes increasingly apparent, whereas computer control systems tend to fail suddenly and completely and without warning, resulting in catastrophic failure of the device.
Unfortunately, modern digital computer systems are vulnerable to many new types of failures to which previous device combinations of mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical systems were not subject. For example, as computer control systems have become increasingly connected to external networks like the Internet they have become increasingly vulnerable to other risks like hacking that can lead to partial or complete device failure. Even a partial software failure can be to a critical function like a car's throttle control, causing uncontrollable acceleration resulting in catastrophic accidents in the real world with significant loss of life. Complete system failure is possible and perhaps imminent due to the extreme vulnerability of modern computer systems to major solar flares (a once every 150 years event last occurring in the Nineteenth Century and now overdue) or to another massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) artificially generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion affecting the entire East coast of the U.S., or to a “digital Pearl Harbor”, for example. In either case, all modern devices of every sort that are controlled by microcomputer systems would completely cease to function until the microcomputer systems were replaced, which would likely be a very long time, resulting quickly in geographically widespread conditions far worse than those of a third world country.
Even if the future avoids such major catastrophic events (or more minor versions), digital computer-based automotive technology is already rapidly advancing in the direction of nearly complete computer control of all of the critical operations of driver-free cars, which are already at the stage of advanced operational prototyping and testing, including a blind driver being driven point to point by a Google test car through regular street traffic without any driver.
It is therefore both possible and necessary to make computers systems inherently far more robust through the use of both internal hardware access barriers or firewalls within computers or microchips and Faraday Cages surrounding those computers and microchips, as the applicant as previously shown in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 398,403 filed Feb. 16, 2012 and published as Publication No. 20120311690 on Dec. 6, 2012, as well as PCT Application No. PCT/US2012/025481, published as International Publication Number WO 2012/112794 A1 on 23 Aug. 2012. Both of these applications are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety. Particularly useful are the embodiment examples shown in FIG. 6, FIG. 11, and FIG. 14.
However, whether or not the non-fragile computer systems described in these applications are used in many or most future devices like automobiles to reduce or eliminate these specific threats, a more basic problem still exists in the design of modern devices. With such devices, failure of all or part of the central computer control system can lead to failure of all or part of the controlled mechanical, hydraulic, or electrical systems that would otherwise be capable of functioning in a manner similar to older, pre-digital devices, if not designed to be totally reliant on the central computer control system, as is generally the case now.
As a result, many or most modern devices are designed to work either exceptionally well or not at all. But all or nothing at all is too fragile. All engineering designs are the product of many trade-offs, but the existing modern approach had generally sacrificed reasonable reliability against catastrophic failures for a vast multitude of enhanced features, including important ones like increased power or efficiency, but far too many enhanced features that are trivial and mainly add to complexity.